The beginning of success: how to write a good creative brief

The lack of effective communication between brands and agencies when presenting a project, social media or paid media plan is commonplace. Vague briefs, or even verbal briefs miss critical information that often results in the agency not fully understanding objectives and generating delays and sub-par work.
A fluid and professional relationship between agencies and clients is key to generate success.

If there is a product to launch, the need for a new campaign to make the audience fall in love or simply new ideas are sought to strengthen the brand, the marketing executives on the client side or from the agency that interact with the creative team must incorporate the skill and processes that will lead them to success: writing a good creative brief.

What is a creative brief?

The starting point for aligning everyone in the teams. When searching for what is a creative brief, concepts such as “abstract”, “general brief document” appear. The truth is that the brief is the tool that marketers must create prior to creating an action plan for a campaign or project.

It is a document in which the objectives of the project cannot be missing, the context, the available resources, references of what you want to achieve, needs, the clearest possible detail about the target audience, and any information about the brand that may be relevant for the particular situation (depending on whether you have already been working with your agency for years).

What is the creative brief for?

Writing a complete and clear creative brief is the most efficient way to save time: unnecessary meetings, repetitive doubts, going back and forth between the agency and the marketing department for issues that should already be clarified

The creative brief is the basis for building a solid and coherent action plan. And of course, a good brief guides the creative agency to develop ideas that meet, or even exceed, the expectations of the brand.

Why it is so important to know how to write a creative brief?

Here are 5 benefits that you’ll enjoy

- Helps the brand understand its starting point.

- It forces us to think and understand what we want from the agency.

- It is the most efficient way to align objectives, audience and expectations.

-It can be transferred from one team to another: creatives, content, paid media, social media, SEO.

-We can use it as a bible whenever we need to review the context.

What should a creative brief have?

Although the content of the creative brief depends 100% on the particularities of the project, we can outline basic elements.

Project

What is there to communicate? What project should creative ideas be thought of? What product should be launched?

Area to Support

Does this brief come from the marketing area? What is the team leading this project? Who is the brand's reference contact for this particular project or initiative?

Business Overview

What is the vision that the brand has regarding this project? What is the context? The trajectory of the project, similar experiences of the brand. A complete background.

The audience

At this point, it is necessary to explain who the current consumer of the brand is, what their current experience is and, if the objective is to make a new consumer fall in love, then the characteristics of the target to be conquered must be completely described.

Most Persuasive Idea

What ideas do we bring to the fore?

This section of the brief is the focus of the entire communication plan.

We can call it “main pressing”. It is the idea we want to communicate and the differentiator of the brand or campaign.

Reasons to Believe

One of the keys of the brief is knowing how to communicate the evidence that shows that the brand can respond to the benefits it offers in a certain campaign.

This reputation must be clear and explicit in the brief.

Goals:

In a brief, it is important to establish the difference between business objectives and communication objectives.

It is not the same to think about the number of subscribers that must be achieved to meet the annual sales goal, than to define how the brand wants to be perceived or how many people it wants to reach through TikTok.

In a brief, the objectives of each concept should be clear.

On which channels

The new project, idea or campaign to develop can live in different channels: social media, public roads, traditional advertising, influencers. It is essential to be able to define the platforms on which the brand must speak to meet its objectives.

Benchmarking

What the competition is doing, where the competition is speaking, how the competition is speaking, is basic information to create a brief.

In conclusion, the creative brief must be clear about the service that the agency to hire requires: if it is social media strategy and content, if you need a paid media plan, if you are looking for a creative idea for influencer marketing actions, if you are looking for a 360 strategy: this point has to be explicit and clear.

What yes, what no

What are the requirements of this campaign. What can we talk about? What can't we talk about? Why?

What messages do we want to communicate?

What are the challenges? Is there anything the agency should know before thinking of the idea?

If the brand has already defined the KPIS, it is mandatory that they be clear and agreed with the agency in the brief. If they are not yet developed, it is essential that they work on establishing them, once the work begins.

Budget
If it’s necessary, it’s another piece of information that must be present in the brief to understand the scope of the project.

Times and next steps. Does the brand already have a release date? Can communication stages be defined?

Brief template free to download. At InPulse Digital we know how important references are, so we're leaving you a free and downloadable brief template so you can adapt it to your brand.